Poetry and Its Institutions: Auden, Jarrell, and Arendt at Midcentury

Abstract

Modernism had played itself out by midcentury. At least that is what a number of poets and critics claimed. As early as 1940, Randall Jarrell argued that while the preceding generation of poets had made substantial innovations, they had become like “recurring decimals, repeat[ing] the novelties they commenced with, each time less valuably than before.”1 After World War II, the tone shifted a bit, and critics dwelt on the dangers of Modernism rather than its routine. It seemed that poets of the avant-garde were susceptible to extreme political views. Ezra Pound, for instance, had gone from writing Imagist manifestos to recording fascist radio broadcasts for Mussolini.2 The only sane response to militant avant-gardism, argued Peter Viereck, was a return to moderation in art and politics. This self-proclaimed conservative drew an analogy between formalism, stability, and the rules of the road: laws, in verse as in traffic, are not restrictive; they increase freedom of movement by decreasing the risk of collision.3 The anthology containing a version of this statement, John Ciardi’s important Mid-Century American Poets (1950), endorses formalism as a corrective to the Modernist extravagances—personal, poetic, and political—he calls “Bohemian”: “For pre-eminently this is a generation not of Bohemian extravagance but of self-conscious sanity in an urbane and cultivated poetry that is the antithesis of the Bohemian spirit.”4